he
West is currently engaged in a clandestine war against terrorism
and, as fiction follows fact, in the years to come we will doubtless
witness the publication of innumerable espionage novels detailing
the villainy of Islamic renegades and the corresponding actions
of Western society to counter the threat. And while this might
be considered as an exploitation of unfortunate events, it is certainly
not a new scenario, for the novelist and the spy have long enjoyed
a unique and symbiotic relationship with one another.
In the historical
sense, while espionage has forever served as a political handmaiden,
the cross-fertilization between espionage
and literature is largely a twentieth century British phenomenon
that gained steadily in popularity with the fiction of Joseph
Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and John le Carré,
who, among others writers, actually worked as intelligence agents.
To be sure, it is an exceedingly beneficial association. Espionage
agencies profit because the novelist generally legitimizes the
spy’s activities, thus contributing to the public perception
that, in an imperfect world, the spy’s activities, however
distasteful, are required. For the novelist the benefit is
even more straightforward: espionage stories are financially
profitable.
But
there is another, somewhat murkier aspect to the story. What
if a novelist’s fictional premise was utilized to legitimize
the activities of a spy agency? This is not as far-fetched
as one would think, for such an event did indeed occur. The
author
was William Le Queux, the agency was British intelligence,
and the enemy was the German state. Different and yet the same,
the
Le Queux factor offers some remarkable parallels to the current
war on terror, particularly when balanced against the ongoing
debates regarding the establishment or realignment of government
agencies, and the enactment or modification of rules of law
and procedure. And while Le Queux simply led where Maugham
and the
others followed, his writings did indeed change the course
of an empire.
Born in London in 1864, Le Queux’s
early life was spent traveling with his parents, resulting in a continental
education.
He was fluent in English, French, Italian and Spanish, and
after a brief spell as an art student in Paris he turned to journalism,
became foreign editor of the Globe and a war correspondent
for the Daily Mail. In the course of his travels, he became
captivated with the world of espionage and even thought to undertake
a bit of amateur spying himself, later writing that he knew everyone
in Europe worth knowing: from Sarah Bernhardt to the Chief of
the Italian Secret Police, and from Cardinal Manning to Madame
Zola. But Le Queux was also gifted with a spirited imagination
that, while apropos for a novelist, ruined his objectivity. He
was forced to abandon his journalistic career and, by 1893, was
devoting all his time to writing books, publishing nearly two
hundred during his lifetime.
An ardent Anglophile, Le Queux
was convinced that every country in Europe—but particularly Germany—envied
the wealth and culture of imperial Britain. He despaired that England, being
populated by gentlemen, would never bring herself to think the
worst of her Continental neighbors and was thus woefully unprepared
for the day, soon to come, when her enemies would invade the
British isles. As he later wrote, all that stood between Britain
and this fate was a nucleus of amateur intelligence agents, like
himself, who were “the most remarkable men, possessing shrewdness,
tact, cunning, daring and—next to His Majesty’s Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs—were the most powerful and important
pillars of England’s supremacy.”
By 1905, Le Queux had become fixated with the threat of German
invasion and began to forward all manner of reports, real and
imagined, to both the Foreign Office and the War Office. In one
classic example of Le Queux’s obsession, he claimed to have
a close personal friend in Berlin—the under director of the
Kaiser’s spy bureau, no less—who posited the existence
of a vast German spy apparatus in Britain. In another, Le Queux
claimed to have received a transcript of a secret meeting with
the Kaiser and his military chiefs in Potsdam. The Kaiser had
allegedly spoken at length about the conquest of Britain and
illustrated his plans with maps and diagrams, and with models
of new aircraft and long-range guns. When asked to produce a
copy of the speech, Le Queux’s claimed it was unavailable,
having been stolen by German spies from his publisher’s
office.
In yet another instance, Le Queux
claimed to have acquired a register—this was also subsequently unavailable—of
British traitors who were aligned with a secret German organization called
the Hidden Hand. “I was aghast at the sight of this list,” he
later wrote. “I sat staggered. It was appalling that persons
whom the nation considered highly-patriotic and upright … should
have fallen into the insidious tentacles of the great German
octopus.” The list, Le Queux said, included members of
Parliament, two well-known writers, and officials of the Foreign
Office,
Home Office, India Office, Admiralty and War Office. With no
proof to substantiate his allegations, the British authorities
perfunctorily ignored the report, as they had all of his others,
effectively determining that Le Queux had ceased to distinguish
fact from fantasy.
But Le Queux refused to be silenced and in
1906 adopted a new and even more ambitious tact. He sought, and
acquired, the complicity
of Field Marshal Lord Roberts—arguably the best known and most
belligerent of the nineteenth century British imperialists—to
further his visions of Britain’s conquest by German hordes.
In Lord Roberts, Le Queux gained an unassailable alley. A national
hero, early in his career Roberts had been awarded the Victoria
Cross for gallantry while serving as a Lieutenant in the Bengal
Horse Artillery (Indian Army) during the Indian Mutiny (1857-1858).
He then commanded the British forces in Afghanistan (1881-1882),
scoring the decisive British victory of the Second Afghan War.
He later became the Commander-in-Chief in India (1885-1893) and
in the South African War (1899-1902) and, finally Commander-in-Chief
of the British Army (1901-1904). If this were not enough, Lord
Roberts was also known affectionately as “Bobs” and
referred to as “Kipling’s General,” as he was
the personification of what Kipling thought of as best of the
British Army in India. With Lord Roberts now in tow, Le Queux’s
fantasies were soon to be seen in an entirely different light.
In
early 1906, Lord Roberts and Le Queux began to plan for a fictionalized
account of a German invasion of England in 1911.
It was to be an elaborate affair and for financial support they
turned to Lord Northcliffe, the creator of Britain’s first
mass market paper, the Daily Mail. An ambitious and
opportunistic man, Northcliffe used his publishing genius
and wealth to become
a key player in the politics of his time. In return for his
financial support, Northcliffe would receive exclusive rights
to serialize
the story in his newspapers prior to its release as a novel.
The
project assumed the reality of a military operation. Staffed
by additional British military experts, Le Queux and Lord Roberts
toured the whole of East Anglia seeking a likely invasion route.
Lord Roberts then placed himself in the mind of a German general
and planned a march on London that would ensure its capture
while encountering the least resistance. Le Queux spent nearly
a year
dutifully writing the story in exciting fictional form before
proudly presenting the results to Northcliffe. Unfortunately,
Lord Northcliffe was not pleased. The line of march, as suggested
by Lord Roberts, took the invading German army through areas
where the circulation of the Daily Mail was minimal.
To counter this oversight, the German attack was realigned
to insure
that the Hun sacked those towns where chances of securing
a boost to the Daily Mail’s circulation were strongest.
Le Queux and Northcliffe then promoted the serialized story
daily,
by publishing, in The Times, the Daily Telegraph,
the Morning Post, the Daily Chronicle and the Daily
Mail itself, a list of those districts the Germans—if “the
Lord Roberts scenario” were followed—would attack the
following morning.
In London, the Daily Mail’s sandwich-board men paraded
up and down London streets dressed in spiked helmets and Prussian
uniforms, while the Prime Minister, Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman,
added to the public furor by telling the House of Commons that
Le Queux was “a pernicious scaremonger” and that the
story was “calculated to inflame public opinion abroad and
alarm the more ignorant public opinion at home.” But, the
Prime Minister notwithstanding, for Northcliffe and Le Queux,
the whole affair was a remarkable success. The Daily Mail’s
circulation soared, and in book form, The Invasion of 1910 sold
more than one million copies in twenty-seven languages. Le
Queux now realized that he was close to achieving a perfect
world.
Through Lord Roberts, he had achieved some measure of credibility,
and through Northcliffe (and the novel) he had found a way
to alert huge numbers of people to the danger from Germany.
Further,
and even more to the point, he could, at the same time, make
a lot of money. From this moment on, the two motives—patriotism
and profit—became inextricably mixed in Le Queux’s fertile
mind.
Buoyed by their impact on British society, Lord Roberts
and Le Queux now formed a voluntary Secret Service Department. “Half
a dozen patriotic men in secret banded themselves together,” Le
Queux wrote later. “Each paying his own expenses, they set
to work gathering information in Germany and elsewhere that might
be useful to our country in case of need. Italy and the Near
East were the regions allotted to me, but my travels took me
also to Russia, to Germany and to Austria.” And, according
to Le Queux, much of the money he earned from The Invasion
of 1910 he spent on this private espionage work:
I parted with my money freely, leading a gay life, with
the one idea of gaining information of use to Great Britain.
I was
the only Englishman who ever entered the gun factory of Erhardt’s
in Dusseldorf, where they were then constructing big guns.
My escapade cost me a large sum in bribery, which I paid
a certain
adventurer in Constantinople, but I got the knowledge that
I wanted. In due course the result of my adventure was reported
by me, docketed, and sent to those dusty pigeon-holes in
the
War Office.
When he was not spying abroad, Le Queux spent his time on counterespionage
work in Britain, again flooding the War Office with reports of “German
officers in mufti” and taking photographs of hotels on the
British East coast with German proprietors and of Germans living
near to a telegraph office, “ready to make a dash and seize
or destroy the instruments” when the Germans invaded.
Other Le Queux scenarios included secret German arsenals near
Charing
Cross, thousands of German spies disguised as waiters, and
mysterious night signals in the Surrey hills. But, said Le
Queux, his reports
were ignored. This indifference he attributed to apathy or,
more likely, to the intervention of the German sympathizers
in the
Hidden Hand.
To circumvent the government apathy, Le Queux again
turned to the public. With the financial backing of D.C. Thomson,
the Scottish
newspaper and publishing magnate, he traveled about Scotland
looking for German spies and published an account of the trip
in Thomson’s Weekly News. Le Queux later edited the
articles and in 1909 published Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting
the Downfall of England. Although he described the book as
a novel, he added that it was “based on serious facts within
my own personal knowledge,” the result of twelve months
traveling Britain and “making a personal enquiry into the
presence and work of the 5,000 German spies here.”
While
Le Queux was certainly a prolific writer, his prose was arguably
forgettable: “There is just a chance of us falling
upon something interesting about here,” Ray was saying,
as he pressed the tobacco into his pipe, and by the expression
on his clean shaven face I saw that he had scented the presence
of spies.” Still, as fanned by Le Queux, Lord Roberts
and the press, British suspicions of Germany reached its high-water
mark upon publication of Spies of the Kaiser. Teeming
with authentic and, if not evidence, at least well researched
incidental detail, Spies of the Kaiser chronicled the
discovery of all manner of German espionage activities, ranging
from surveillance of England’s coastal defenses to attempted
thefts of plans for advanced battleships, submarines, and airplanes.
To lend further credibility to the narrative, Le Queux noted
in the introduction: “As I write, I have before me a file
of amazing documents, which plainly show the feverish activity
with which this advance guard of our enemy is working.”
While it is virtually certain that Le Queux possessed no such
documents—as none, save his own, seemingly existed—Spies
of the Kaiser nonetheless achieved the desired effect. Soon
after its publication Le Queux began to receive letters detailing
the suspicious behavior of German waiters, barbers and tourists
in the vicinity of telephone, telegraph, bridges and railway
lines on the east coast and around London. While the various
reports presented what amounted to be little more than the amplification
of Spies of the Kaiser’s fictional scenarios, Le
Queux considered them to be even more proof of Germany’s
malicious intentions and, more to the point, independent confirmation
of his own suspicions. With letters in hand, Le Queux sought
to elevate his own “spy catcher” reputation by sharing
them with the British government. On this occasion, his point
of contact was Lieutenant Colonel (later Brigadier General Sir)
James Edmonds, then director of M05—military operations counterintelligence.
While Edmonds’ job was to uncover foreign spies in Britain,
in fact, he did nothing of the sort. However, in fairness, this
cannot be attributed to a lack of will or skill—he later authored
Britain’s official history of World War I on the Western
Front—but rather to his negligible £200 annual budget, and
the fact that his entire staff consisted of but two assistants.
At
what can only be viewed as a magical moment in history, Le Queux’s new evidence reached Edmonds at precisely the right
moment. Besieged by the onslaught of public opinion, rumor and
outright lies, Edmonds found himself facing a situation wherein
the specter of a German invasion—however improbable—had been
all but legitimized. For Edmonds, this was an impossible situation.
As the one official charged with discovering German espionage
activities in England, he had, in reality, no proof whatsoever.
Yet, wise in the ways of government—and with an eye to his
own budget and staffing levels—he took his “conclusions” to
R. B. Haldane, the British secretary of state for war, who in
March 1909 directed the Committee of Imperial Defence to examine “the
nature and extent of the foreign espionage that is at present
taking place within this country and the danger to which it may
expose us.” Chaired by Lord Haldane himself, the membership
was impressive, an indication of how seriously the government
regarded the subject. Included were First Lord of the Admiralty,
the Home Secretary, the permanent undersecretaries of the Treasury
and the Foreign Office, the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police,
the Director of Military Operations, and the Director of Naval
Intelligence.
On Tuesday, 30 March 1909 members of the committee
met in secret session at 2 Whitehall Gardens, Westminster, to
consider the
question of foreign espionage in Great Britain. The first witness
was none other than Colonel James Edmonds. This was an important
moment for Edmonds. The Committee made its recommendations to
the Cabinet, and the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, was personally
interested in the outcome. The future of Edmonds’ department
and indeed his own career could well depend on his ability to
convince the influential members of the committee of the danger
he believed Britain faced from German spies. Accordingly, and
drawing heavily upon Le Queux’s flights of fancy—waiters,
barbers and night signals in Surry figured prominently in his
testimony—Edmonds presented to the subcommittee a variety of
evidence concerning German espionage in Britain, much of it misinterpreted
or fabricated.
Edmonds began his testimony by setting out his
credentials: he had studied the German army for practically all
his life and
he knew personally a German officer he described only as “Major
von X,” who was head of the German secret service. “Espionage,” said
Edmonds. “Is openly recognized in the German Army as an
essential and honorable weapon of war.” And, to this end,
the Germans possessed an elaborate espionage system in Britain,
dividing England into any number of sections, each under a secret
service officer who, in turn, had under him a number of agents,
some “stationary”—those settled in Britain under
commercial or academic cover—and others who were more mobile,
who were dispatched to Britain for specific reconnaissance activities.
The
purpose of the German agents was to collect information with
which to supplement maps, to compile military reports, to
buy secret information, and to make a reconnaissance of those
docks, bridges, telegraph lines and railways that could be sabotaged
upon the outbreak of war. In summary, Edmonds noted: “A
number of suspicious cases have been reported to and investigated
by the War Office during the last few years. These cases point
to the fact that there is an extensive German system for collecting
information in this country. We have, however, no regular system
or organization to detect and report suspicious cases and we
are entirely dependent on casual information.”
By the third
meeting of the committee Lord Haldane suggested that there was
sufficient evidence to issue a report. The rest
of the committee agreed and Haldane released the following statement:
The evidence which was produced left no doubt in the minds of
the committee that an extensive system of German espionage exists
in this country, and that we have no organization for keeping
in touch with that espionage and for accurately determining its
extent or objectives.
The committee also concluded that Britain’s foreign intelligence
system—particularly the meager War Office and Admiralty networks—were
woefully inadequate, and recommended the formation of a secret
service bureau to serve three purposes: to serve as a barrier
between the military services and foreign spies; to act as the
intermediary between the military service departments and British
agents abroad; and to take charge of counterespionage. Drawn
from Le Queux and company’s fixations, and supplemented
by the recommendation of Lord Haldane, the British Secret Service
was established in 1909. While certainly a significant event
in and of itself, even more important was how the British sought
to deal dealt with a singular claim in Le Queux’s Spies
of the Kaiser: “England is the paradise of the spy,
and will remain so until we can bring pressure to bear to compel
the introduction of fresh legislation against them.” By
1909, the 1889 Official Secrets Act was effectively revised,
shifting the burden of proof from the prosecution to the defense
in cases of alleged espionage.
So was there really any factual
basis to suggest a massive German conspiracy to invade England?
Not really. But, in the end, it
made little difference and it can be reasonably deduced that
Britain’s predisposition to the First World War was caused
by culture: to be precise, the culture of militarism spawned
from fear and fanned by the rhetoric of William Le Queux and
others like him. But if Britain’s entry into World War I
was indeed caused by self-fulfilling prophecies drawn from the
fictional machinations of German spies against England, is this
so different from today and similar machinations—real and imagined—attributed
to Islamic states?
In the current geopolitical environment,
this emerges as a central and menacing question and one is reminded
of the cautionary words
of the nineteenth century Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant: “Facts
are of all things in the world the most false to nature, the
most opposed to experience, the most contradictory of all the
grand laws of existence ... for us, truth and fact are two
different things; and to say that some incident which is false
to nature is taken from life is an altogether unsatisfactory
and inadmissible excuse.”
In this respect, it seems that the obviousness of a situation
may well be exceeded by only the frequency with which it is overlooked.
Author’s
Note: In addition
to the historical record, I have borrowed extensively from three primary texts
that concern
themselves with the beginnings of British intelligence. The
first is Thomas Fergusson’s British Military Intelligence,
1870-1914, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1984.
The second is Phillip Knightly’s The Second Oldest Profession:
Spys and Spying in the Twentieth Century, New York: Norton & Company,
1987. Knightly unquestionably offers the most lucid contemporary
treatment of LeQueux’s connection with British intelligence
activities. The third is LeQueux’s own Things I Know
about Kings, Celebrities, and Crooks, London: Eveleigh, Nash,
and Grayson, 1923. A kind of droll autobiography, this is a rather
free ranging narrative that suggests that LeQueux, by age 62,
remained unencumbered by historical and political reality.
Brett F. Woods received his Ph.D. in
literature at the University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, England,
where his principal research involved geopolitics and the evolution
of British espionage fiction. He is a senior executive fellow
of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
and the author of numerous essays, monographs and books, both
fiction and nonfiction. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
